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TEST  TARGET  (MT-S) 


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Photographic 

Sciences 
Corporation 


33  WEST  MAIN  STREET 

WEBSTER,  N.Y.  14580 

(716)  •72-4S03 


iV 


#*4 


6^ 


Is 


CIHM/ICMH 

Microfiche 

Series. 


CIHM/ICIVIH 
Collection  de 
microfiches. 


Canadian  Institute  for  Historical  Microreproductions  /  Institut  Canadian  de  microreproductions  historiques 


Technical  and  Bibliographic  Notes/Notes  techniques  et  bibliographiques 


The  Institute  has  attempted  to  obtain  the  best 
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which  may  alter  any  of  the  images  in  the 
reproduction,  or  which  may  significantly  change 
the  usual  method  of  filming,  are  checked  below. 


E 


□ 


D 


D 
D 


D 


D 


Coloured  covers/ 
Couverture  de  couleur 


I      I    Covers  damaged/ 


Couverture  endommag6e 


Covers  restored  and/or  laminated/ 
Couverture  restaur^e  et/ou  pellicul^e 


I      I    Cover  title  missing/ 


Le  titre  de  couverture  manque 


I      I    Coloured  maps/ 


Cartes  gdographiques  en  couleur 


Coloured  ink  (i.e.  other  than  blue  or  black)/ 
Encre  de  couleur  (i.e.  autre  que  bleue  ou  noire) 


I      I    Coloured  plates  and/or  iSlustrations/ 


Planches  et/ou  illustrations  en  couleur 

Bound  with  other  material/ 
Reli6  avec  d'autres  documents 

Tight  binding  may  cause  shadows  or  distortion 
along  interior  margin/ 

La  re  liure  serr6e  peut  causer  de  I'ombre  ou  de  la 
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mais,  lorsque  cela  dtait  possible,  ces  pages  n'ont 
pas  6t6  film^es. 

Additional  commt^nts:/ 
Commentaires  suppldmentaires; 


L'Institut  a  microfilm^  le  meilleur  exemplaire 
qu'il  lui  a  6t6  possible  de  se  procurer.  Les  details 
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une  image  reproduite,  ou  qui  peuvent  exiger  une 
modification  dans  la  mdthode  normale  de  filmage 
sont  indiqufo  ci-dessous. 

□    Coloured  pages/ 
Pages  de  couleur 

□    Pages  damaged/ 
Pages  endommagdes 

I      I    Pages  restored  and/or  laminated/ 


D 
D 


This  item  is  filmed  at  the  reduction  ratio  checked  below/ 

Ce  document  est  filmd  au  taux  de  reduction  indiqu6  ci-dessous. 


Pages  restaur^es  et/ou  pellicul^es 

Pages  discoloured,  stained  or  foxei 
Pages  ddcolordes,  tachetdes  ou  piqudes 

Pages  detached/ 
Pages  ddtachdes 

Showthrough/ 
Transparence 


r~~|    Pages  discoloured,  stained  or  foxed/ 
I      I    Pages  detached/ 
r~~|    Showthrough/ 


□    Quality  of  print  varies/ 
Quality  inigale  de  I'impression 

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Comprend  du  materiel  suppl^mentaire 


Only  edition  available/ 
Seule  Edition  disponible 


Pages  wholly  or  partially  obscured  by  errata 
slips,  tissues,  etc.,  have  been  refilmed  to 
ensure  the  best  possible  image/ 
Les  pages  totalement  ou  partiellement 
obscurcies  par  un  feuillet  d'errata,  une  pelure, 
etc.,  ont  6t^  filmdes  d  nouveau  de  fapon  A 
obtenir  la  meilleure  image  possible. 


10X 

14X 

18X 

22X 

26X 

30X 

1 

12X 

16X 

20X 

24X 

28X 

32X 

1 

aire 

I  details 
ues  du 
t  modifier 
ger  une 
>  filmage 


The  copy  filmed  here  has  been  reproduced  thanks 
to  the  generosity  of: 

Library  of  the  Public 
Archives  of  Canada 


The  images  appearing  here  are  the  best  quality 
possible  considering  the  condition  and  legibility 
of  the  original  copy  and  in  keeping  with  the 
filming  contract  specifications. 


L'exemplaire  filmA  fut  reproduit  grAce  A  la 
ginirositA  de: 

La  bibiiothique  des  Archives 
publiques  du  Canada 

Les  images  suivantes  ont  M  reproduites  avec  le 
plus  grand  soin,  compte  tenu  de  la  condition  et 
de  la  netteti  de  rexemplaira  film*,  et  en 
conformity  avec  les  conditions  du  contrat  de 
filmage. 


/ 
jdes 


Original  copies  in  printed  paper  covers  are  filmed 
beginning  with  the  front  cover  and  ending  on 
the  last  page  with  a  printed  or  illustrated  impres- 
sion, or  the  back  cover  when  appropriate.  All 
other  original  copies  are  filmed  beginning  on  the 
first  page  with  a  printed  or  illustrated  impres- 
sion, and  ending  on  the  last  page  with  a  printed 
or  illustrated  impression. 


Les  exemplaires  originaux  dont  la  couverture  en 
papier  est  ImprimAe  sont  filmte  en  commen9ant 
par  le  premier  plat  et  en  terminant  soit  par  la 
derniire  page  qui  comporte  une  empreinte 
d'impression  ou  d'iiiustration,  soit  par  le  second 
plat,  selon  le  cas.  Tf'us  les  autres  exemplaires 
originaux  sont  filmAs  en  commen^ant  par  la 
premiere  page  qui  comporte  une  empreinte 
d'impression  ou  d'iiiustration  et  en  terminant  par 
la  derniire  page  qui  comporte  une  telle 
empreinte. 


The  last  recorded  frame  on  each  microfiche 
shall  contain  the  symbol  —^(meaning  "CON- 
TINUED"), or  the  symbol  V  (meaning  "END"), 
whichever  applies. 


Un  des  symboles  suivants  apparaltra  sur  la 
dernlAre  image  de  cheque  microfiche,  selon  le 
cas:  le  symbole  — ►  signifie  "A  SUiVRE  ".  le 
symbols  V  signifie  "FIN". 


ire 


Maps,  plates,  charts,  etc.,  may  he  filmed  at 
different  reduction  ratios.  Those  too  large  to  be 
entirely  included  in  one  exposure  are  filmed 
beginning  in  the  upper  left  hand  corner,  left  to 
right  and  top  to  bottom,  as  many  frames  as 
required.  The  following  diagrams  illustrate  the 
method: 


Les  cartes,  planches,  tableaux,  etc.,  peuvent  6tre 
film6s  d  des  taux  de  reduction  diffArents. 
Lorsque  le  document  est  trop  grand  pour  Atre 
reproduit  en  un  seul  clichA,  11  est  film6  d  partir 
de  Tangle  supirieur  gauche,  de  gauche  d  droite, 
et  de  haut  en  bas,  en  prenant  le  nombre 
d'images  ndcessaire.  Les  diagrammes  suivants 
illustrent  la  mAthode. 


ly  errata 
Bd  to 

nt 

ne  pelure, 

i9on  it 


1 

2 

3 

32X 


1 

2 

3 

4 

5 

6 

CABOT  AND    THE    TKAXSMISSION   OF  ENGUS/f 
POWER  IN  NORTH  AMERICA. 


2ln  Tllitircss 


DKI.IVERRI)     BEFORE    Till. 


Nev;    York    Historical    Society 


ON     ITS 


NINE  TV-SECO  N/)    A  NN/ 1  ERSA  R  J ', 


Wednesday,  November   i8,  i8y6, 


HY 


JUSTIN    WINSOR,   LL.I). 


NEW  YORK  : 

PRINTED    1"()R   Till-:    SOCTKTV 

1896. 


^ 


CABOT  AND    THE  TRANSMISSION  OF  ENGLISH 
POWER  IN  NORTH  AMERICA. 


An  Address 


DEMVEREn    BEFORE    THE 


New    York    Historical    Society 


ON     ITS 


N'INE  TY-SECO  ND    A  NNIVERSA  R  V, 


Wednesday,  November   i8,  1896, 


BY 


JUSTIN   WINSOR,  LL.D. 


NEW  YORK: 

PRINTED   FOR  THE   SOCIETY. 

1896. 


Officers  of  the  Society,    1896. 


PRESIDENT, 

JOHN     A  L  S  O  P     KING. 

FIRST   VICE-PRESIDENT, 

J.     PIERPONT     MORGAN. 

SECOND    VICE-PRESIDENT, 

JOHN     S..     KEN  N  E  I)  Y . 

FOREIGN    CORRESPONDING    SECRETARY, 

REV.     EUGENE    A.     HOFFMAN,     D.D 

DOMESTIC    CORRESPONDING    SECRETARY, 

EDWARD     F.     DE     LANCEY. 

RECORDING    SECRETARY, 

ANDREW     WARNER. 

TREASURER, 

ROBERT     S  C  H  E  L  L . 


LIBRARIAN, 

WILLIAM     KELBY. 


EXECUTIVE   COMMITTEE. 


FIRST   CLASS — FOR    ONE    YEAR,    ENDING    1 897. 

JOHN    A.  WEKKES,  J.    PIERPONT   MORGAN. 

SECOND    CLASS — FOR    TWO   YEARS,    ENDING    1 898. 

EDWARD    F.  DE   EANCEY,  DANIEL    PARISH,  Jr., 

FRANCIS   TOMES. 

THIRD    CLASS — FOR   THREE   YEARS,    ENDING    1 899. 

FREDERIC    GALLATIN,  ISAAC   J.    GREENWOOD, 

CHARLES    HOWLAND    RUSSELL. 

FOURTH    CLASS — FOR    FOUR   YEARS,  ENDING    I9OO. 

JOHN    S.    KENNEDY,  GEORGE   W.  VANDERBILT, 

CHARLES   ISHAM, 

EDWARD   F.  DE  LANCEY,  Chairman, 
DANIEL   PARISH,  Jr.,  Secretary. 

[The  President,  Recording  Secretary,  Treasurer,  and  Librarian 
are  members,  ex-officio^  of  the  Executive  Committee.] 


JK. .- . 


PROCEEDINGS. 


lORGAN. 


USH,  Jr., 


>9- 

:nwood, 


o. 
)ERBILT, 


Librarian 


At  a  meetinjj  of  the  Nkw  York  Historical  Society,  held  in 
its  Hall,  on  Wednesday  evening,  November  i8,  1896,  to  celebrate 
the  Ninety-second  Anniversary  of  the  Founding  of  the  Society  : 

The  proceedings  were  opened  with  i)rayer  by  the  Very  Reverend 
Eugene  A.  Hoffman,  D.I).,  Dean  of  the  General  Theological  Semi- 
nary. 

The  President  made  some  remarks  on  the  history,  progress,  and 
wants  of  the  Society. 

The  Anniversary  Address  was  then  delivered  by  Justin  Winsor, 
LL.D.,  of  Harvard  University,  on  '•  Cabot  and  the  Transmission  of 
English  Power  in  North  America." 

On  its  conclusion,  the  Rev.  B.  F.  De  Costa,  D.D.,  with  remarks, 
submitted  the  following  resolution  which  was  adopted  unanimously  : 

Resolved^  That  the  thanks  of  the  Society  be  presented  to  Justin 
VViNSOR,  LL.D.,  for  the  eloquent  and  learned  address  which  he  has 
delivered  this  evening,  and  that  he  be  requested  to  furnish  a  copy 
for  publication. 

A  benediction  was  then  pronounced  by  Dean  Hoffman. 

The  Society  then  adjourned. 

Extract  from  the  Minutes  : 

Andrew  Warner, 

Recording  Secretary. 


CABOT    AND    THE    TRANSMISSION 
OF    ENGLISH    POWER    IN 
•    NORTH    AMERICA. 


Go  back,  if  you  please,  to  a  tropical  night  in 
October  a  little  over  four  hundred  years  ago.  The 
Great  Discoverer  stands  on  his  deck,  and  the  goal 
he  was  seeking  is  before  him.  A  rising  moon  at 
his  back  lies  glimmering  on  a  sandy  shore  in  front. 
Perhaps  what  he  saw  was  the  Asiatic  main.  Per- 
haps it  was  one  of  the  thousands  of  islands  which 
Marco  Polo  had  told  the  European  world  lay  off 
that  shore  of  the  Orient  which  looked  toward  the 


rismg  sun. 


From  the  time  when,  upon  the  return  of  Colum- 
bus, Peter  Martyr  questioned  if  the  Asiatic  coast 
had  really  been  touched,  down  to  the  failure  of  the 
Admiral  on  his  fourth  voyage  to  find  a  passage 
through  the  land  of  Veragua,  the  cunning  cosmog- 
raphers  of  Europe  had  played  fast  and  loose  with 
the  notions  that  what  had  been  found  was  really  a 
New  World,  or  the  Old  World  approached  in  a 
new  way.  On  his  second  voyage,  Columbus,  loath 
to  recognize  what  others  saw,  found  more  *^lian 
half  of  his  companions  better  informed  than  him- 


8 


Cabot  and  the  Transmission  of 


self.  The  Asiatic  main  had  not,  as  he  claimed, 
been  found  in  the  insular  Cuba.  It  has  recently 
been  proved,  where  earlier  it  was  a  necessary  de- 
duction, that  Columbus,  on  his  last  voyage,  or  to 
be  more  precise,  that  his  brother  Bartholomew,  as 
is  shown  in  a  remarkable  map  which  Professor 
Wieser  has  reproduced,  was  convinced  that  a 
stretch  of  ocean  lay  beyond  the  Isthmus,  where 
Balboa  later  saw  it.  The  way  was  thus  made 
clear  in  1505  either  to  reach  the  Red  Sea  and  the 
Mediterranean,  or  to  round  the  Cape  of  Good 
Hope,  on  the  track  to  western  Europe,  if  only  a 
strait  be  found  in  the  tropics,  as  Magellan  nearly  a 
score  of  years  later  was  to  find  one  at  the  south. 

While  this  development  was  going  on  in  the  belt 
of  the  Antilles,  a  new  experience  was  bringing 
into  correlation  with  the  solution  in  the  south  the 
geographical  mystery  of  the  north.  This  new  dis- 
closure was  the  fruition,  under  the  new  passion, 
of  numerous  ventures,  which  the  hardy  west-coun- 
try English  seamen  had  made  to  discover  and  sail 
beyond  the  long-sought  island  of  Bresil.  So  it 
was  that  not  long  after  daybreak,  on  a  summer's 
day,  in  a  northern  latitude,  in  1497,  less  than  a 
score  of  daring  adventurers,  on  board  a  little  ship 
called  the  Matthew,  a  mere  cock-boat  in  our  mod- 
ern eyes  (which  for  some  weeks  had  been  buffeting 
the  sea,  with  an  average  speed  of  forty  or  fifty 
miles  a  day),  espied  a  land  which  in  its  transient 
summer  verdure  appeared  more   pleasing  than   it 


i 


\% 


a 


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English  Poivcr  in  North  America. 


9 


really  was.  They  supposed  it  to  be  the  Asiatic 
coast  '"    a  high  latitude. 

It  did  not  matter  to  that  scant  company,  and  it 
does  not  matter  to  us,  whether  the  shore  seen  in 
that  crisp  morning  hour  was  the  shore  of  some 
coast-island  or  the  mainland.  In  conducting  an 
expedition,  as  Henry  the  Seventh  said,  "  in  our 
name  and  by  our  commandment,"  it  is  enough  that 
by  what  he  saw,  John  Cabot  then  created  for  a 
power  that  discredited  the  Bull  of  Demarcation  a 
claim  to  a  share  in  this  Occidental-Orient,  what- 
ever it  might  prove  to  be. 

These  two  revelations  of  an  hour  emerging  from 
the  night,  one  in  the  north  and  the  other  in  the 
south,  within  five  years  of  each  other,  were  to  de- 
termine that  a  people,  predominantly  English  in 
spirit  if  not  in  blood,  now  holds  the  broad  areas  of 
this  northern  continent,  while  the  lesser  southern 
spaces  have  been  yielded  for  the  most  part  to  a 
Latin  race. 

It  is  by  no  means  certain  that  the  initial  contact 
developed  for  the  northern  discoverer  any  part  of 
the  main  coast.  We  know  that  Columbus  did  not 
see  it  in  the  tropics.  It  depends  upon  the  spot — 
and  this  is  in  dispute — wdiere  we  place  the  landfall 
of  Cabot  in  the  north,  whether  we  allow  him 
then  to  have  looked  upon  the  mainland.  There 
can  be  no  question,  however,  with  the  cautious 
and  circumspect  historian,  that  the  Genoese  and 
the  Venetian-Bristolese  had  the    essential  priority 


> 

i 


10 


Cabot  and  the  Transmission  of 


in  the  discovery  of  the  upper  and  lower  regions  of 
the  North  American  Continent. 
•  To  dispute  the  precedence  of  Cabot,  there  has 
been  advanced  the  claim  of  Vespucius  to  a  voyage 
in  1497.  It  was  discredited  at  the  time,  and  is  not 
proven  now.  Spain  and  England  then,  the  foster- 
parents  of  this  western  world,  owed  their  initial 
successes  to  the  guiding  minds  of  two  expatriated 
Italians. 

The  interest  which  follows  the  voyage  of  Colum- 
bus is  exceptionally  increased  by  a  narrative  from 
his  own  hand — the  only  undoubted  original  ac- 
count from  any  of  the  earliest  explorers.  It  is  un- 
fortunate for  the  interest  which  the  coming  anni- 
versary creates,  that  Cabot  himself  has  left  us  not 
a  syllable  of  his  own.  All  that  we  know  we  get 
by  hearsay,  and  even  as  hearsay  it  is  scant  and  in- 
adequate. 

Nevertheless,  what  John  Cabot,  a  seaman  by 
reputation,  a  resident  of  England  for  six  or  seven 
years,  and  a  man  in  the  prime  of  life,  did  for  Eng- 
land and  for  us,  we  can  well  understand,  if  we  know 
but  little  of  the  way  in  which  he  did  it. 

There  enters  into  our  conception  of  the  condi- 
tions of  maritime  discovery  toward  the  west,  at  a 
time  when  the  bruit  of  Columbus's  success  reached 
Bristol,  vastly  more  of  probability  and  possibility 
than  of  accredited  fact.  That  the  unknown  paths 
of  the  great  western  sea  had  been  adventurously 


English  Power  in  North  America. 


1 1 


traversed  for  a  century  or  more,  in  the  north  as 
well  as  in  the  south,  admits  of  no  question.  Spec- 
ulative enterprise  had  repeatedly  sought  (and  Cab- 
ot himself  is  supposed  to  have  shared  in  it)  a  sup- 
posed island  lying  seaward  beyond  Ireland.  A 
belief  in  its  existence  has  remained  so  incrrained  in 
the  English  mind  that  only  in  our  day  has  the 
British  Admiralty  ordered  its  obliteration  from  the 
charts.  That  the  fishermen  of  the  Bristol  and 
English  channels,  in  the  search  for  fish  to  meet  the 
fast-day  diet  of  the  Church,  had  pushed  far  beyond 
Iceland  in  the  north,  and  beyond  this  supposed 
island  in  the  west,  is  a  matter  of  record.  Whether 
they  had  discovered  the  shoals  of  cod  for  which 
the  Banks  of  Newfoundland  were  to  become  fa- 
mous is  a  question  which  we  have  abundant  war- 
rant in  raising,  and  no  explicit  testimony  to  solve. 
That  such  voyages  were  made  in  the  fifteenth 
century,  and  before  the  fame  of  Columbus  marked 
the  era,  has  long  been  supposed.  That  even  Bis- 
cayan  fishermen  went  there  in  these  early  days 
formerly  seemed  sufficiently  so  well  established,  that 
Spain  in  her  diplomacy,  more  than  once,  claimed 
that  by  the  acts  of  such  fishermen  she  placed  her 
right  to  these  northeastern  shores  before  that  of 
the  Enolish.  The  historian  hesitates  to  discard  a 
probability  so  inherently  fixed,  as  that  hardy  mari- 
ners of  western  Europe  knew  the  Grand  Banks  in 
the  middle  of  the  fifteenth  century,  though  no  one 
can  offer  determinate  evidence.     It  is  certainly  not 


12 


Cabot  and  the  Transmission  of 


beyond  a  possibility  that  some  chance  development 
may  at  any  time  make  it  clear. 

We  may  then  readily  conceive  that  it  needed 
nothing  but  the  report  in  England  of  the  return 
of  the  Great  Discoverer  to  Palos,  to  work  in  due 
time  upon  the  imagination  of  a  domiciled  Italian 
mariner  so  as  to  arouse  the  enthusiasm  of  advent- 
ure. Zuan  Cabotto,  living  in  Bristol,  had  a  spirit 
buoyed  by  the  traditions  of  Venetian  seamanship. 
He  had  travelled  eastward  as  far  as  Mecca,  and 
had  gcized  upon  caravans  returning  from  the  Ori- 
ent. In  his  birth  he  was  a  fellow-townsman  of  the 
now  famous  Genoese.  He  applied  for  and  received 
from  the  English  king  a  patent  for  a  voyage  west- 
ward. The  date  of  this  license,  in  March,  1496, 
as  well  as  the  letter  of  Raimondo  (first  disclosed 
thirty  years  ago),  preclude  the  recognition  of  the 
year  1494  as  that  of  the  voyage,  though  it  is  found 
in  contemporary  documents,  and  has  been  adhered 
to  in  our  time  by  even  such  scholars  as  Davezac. 
It  is  of  much  more  importance  to  determine  whether 
the  mention  of  Sebastian  Cabot's  name  in  the  li- 
cense is  ground  for  assuming  that  the  son,  now  a 
man  of  nearly  twenty-five,  accompanied  the  father 
on  the  voyage,  since  it  is  from  Sebastian's  reputed 
talks  with  others  that  we  derive  such  knowledge  of 
the  voyage  as  is  additional  to  the  slight  reports 
gathered  by  his  contemporaries  froni  the  com- 
mander, John  Cabot,  himself. 

Unfortunately,  there  is  a  growing  conviction  that 


English  Power  in  North  America,  13 

Sebastian  Cabot  is  not  a  man  to  be  trusted.  In 
large  part  it  is  because  he  was  accustomed  to  tell 
different  stories  at  different  times,  and  to  talk  inco- 
herently. We  must  never  forget,  however,  that  in 
these  recitals  we  are  dealing,  not  with  what  Sebas- 
tian Cabot  said  in  studied,  written  phrase,  but  with 
what  other  people,  not  without  prejudice,  thought 
he  said,  and  affirmed  that  he  did  say.  The  testi- 
mony often  degenerates  to  a  hearsay  of  a  hearsay. 
While  it  is  true  that  Sebastian's  testimony  stands  in 
constant  need  of  verification,  it  behooves  a  careful 
critic  of  his  characte;*  to  give  the  old  pilot's  reputa- 
tion the  benefit  of  some  doubt. 

If  we  believe  Sebastian's  own  words  as  reported, 
he  accompanied  his  father  both  on  his  first  and 
second  voyages.  If  we  believe  contemporary  wit- 
nesses, and  some  are  bitterly  reproachful  in  their 
negatives,  Sebastian  was  never  on  the  coast  of 
North  America  at  all.  The  license  of  the  voyage 
in  1497  shows  that  he  and  two  other  sons  \yere 
joined  with  the  father  in  a  permission  to  make  a 
voyage.  This  does  not  certainly  prove  that  he  or 
the  other  sons  went.  Indeed,  in  view  of  the  con- 
flicting testimony  and  eager  habit  of  those  who 
sought  the  royal  countenance  in  such  matters,  a 
recent  writer,  Judge  Prowse,  of  Newfoundland, 
has  claimed  that  the  insertion  of  the  names  of  the 
three  sons  in  the  license  was  merely  a  legal  subter- 
fuge to  keep  alive  the  license  to  the  end  of  the  life 
of  either  ;  but  it  would  seem  that  this  was  a  provi- 


14 


Cabot  and  the  Transmission  cf 


sion  hardly  necessary,  since  the  patent  of  itself,  in 
express  terms,  extends  the  right  of  search  to  the 
heirs  and  deputies  of  the  patentees. 

More  than  a  year  elapsed  after  receiving-  the 
patent  before  John  Cabot  put  to  sea,  in  May,  1497, 
and  he  was  back  in  Bristol,  contrasting  its  full 
tides  with  the  scant  flow  which  he  found  in  the  New 
World,  early  in  August,  so  that  a  period  of  about 
three  months  covers  his  eventful  experience. 

We  have  the  names  of  the  companions  of  Colum- 
bus in  his  first  voyage,  and  among  them  we  find 
that  of  a  pilot,  Juan  de  la  Cosa.  The  earliest  map 
which  we  have  of  American  waters  was  made  in 
1500  by  this  man,  and  he  is  thought  to  have  de- 
rived what  knowledge  he  showed  of  the  coast 
where  Cabot  had  been,  from  the  reports  of  the 
Bristol  navigator.  As  not  a  chart  of  John  Cabot 
has  come  down  to  us,  this  stretch  of  water  "  found 
by  the  English,"  as  Cosa  says  of  it,  may  stand  for 
all  that  we  have  in  a  chart  of  Cabot's  northern 
pioneer  experiences.  As  Cosa's  map  is  the  earliest 
drawn  delineation  which  we  have  of  these  new  dis- 
coveries, so  we  have  the  earliest  engraved  repre- 
sentation in  the  edition  of  Ptolemy  issued  at  Rome 
in  1508.  That  Ruysch,  the  maker  of  this  other 
map,  embodied  in  his  draft  of  this  northern  shore 
the  experience  of  Cabot  more  directly,  is  to  be  in- 
ferred from  the  accompanying  text,  where  it  is  indi- 
cated that  Ruysch  was  on  the  Matthew  with 
Cabot,  and  if  this  was  the  case,  Ruysch's  name  is 


EnzlisJi  Pozuer  in  North  America. 


15 


the  only  one  known  to  us  of  less  than  a  score  of 
companions  who  shared  with  Cabot  the  elation  of 
that  summer  morning  when  they  first  sighted  land. 
It  is  also  held  from  Ruysch's  testimony  that  in 
leaving  Cape  Clear  on  the  Irish  coast,  Cabot  swept 
northerly  in  a  course  very  like  what  we  in  our  day 
call  Great  Circle  sailing. 

In  the  accounts  of  the  voyage  of  Columbus  we 
have  courses  and  distances,  and  his  track  can  be 
plotted  reasonably  well  on  a  modern  chart.  So 
the  registrations  of  his  compass  and  the  observa- 
tions of  his  speed,  gauged  we  must  remember  by 
the  eye  only,  serve  us  in  the  attempt  to  fix  his 
landfall.  All  such  help  is  wanting  when  we  en- 
deavor to  determine  the  scene  of  that  eventful 
summer  morning  in  1497.  Fifty  years  ago  and 
more  the  discovery,  in  Germany,  of  what  is  now 
known  as  the  Cabot  mappemonde,  preserved  in 
the  great  Paris  Library,  revealed  for  the  first  time 
a  definite  spot  for  this  landfall  on  the  coast  of  Cape 
Breton.  Unfortunately,  the  map,  like  almost  every- 
thing associated  with  the  name  of  Sebastian  Cabot, 
is  a  bone  of  contention,  and  precisely  what  Se- 
bastian Cabot's  connection  with  it  was,  is  still  in 
doubt.  It  is  a  large  engraved  map  of  the  world, 
bearing  on  the  margins  some  printed  historical 
and  descriptive  legends  which  purport  to  emanate 
from  Sebastian  himself.  A  copy  of  them  in  the 
handwriting  of  a  certain  Dr.  Grajales  has  lately 
been  found  in  Spain ;  but  it  is  by  no  means  certain 


i6 


Cabot  and  the  Transmission  of 


\    \ 


that  this  copy  is  more  chan  a  scribe's  transcript, 
tilouirli  it  is  possible  that  this  Spanish  savant  may 
have  written  the  legends  at  Sebastian's  dictation. 
Citations  of  these  inscriptions  by  contemporaries 
vary  in  places,  and  this  indicates  <-hat  a  document 
now  known  in  but  a  single  copy,  may  in  its  day 
have  been  popular  enough  to  have  passed  through 
several  editions.  At  the  sale  of  an  old  library  in 
Silesia,  a  year  or  two  ago,  the  same  legends,  set 
with  the  same  type,  were  discovered  in  a  brochure, 
which  luckily  found  an  vmerican  purchaser ;  and 
this  may  indicate  a  further  popularity  of  these  rid- 
dle-like inscriptions. 

It  has  never  been  necessary  to  assume  that  the 
coast  lines  of  the  middle  of  the  eighteenth  century 
shown  on  this  map,  were  taken  from  Cabot's  plots 
made  at  the  close  of  the  preceding  century,  since 
the  outlines  were  certainb  taken  directly  from 
French  maps,  then  recent,  and  much  more  de- 
tailed than  Cabot's  maps  could  have  been. 

Upon  this  borrowed  configuration,  at  the  island 
of  Cape  Breton,  Sebastian  had  set  the  words 
Tierra  prima  vista,  as  marking  the  land  first  seen. 
This  explicit  testimony  has  been  accepted  by  such 
writers  as  Deane  and  Markham,  while  others  have 
found  in  the  inconsistencies  of  the  map  and  its  le- 
gends some  ground  for  believing  that  the  landfall 
was  placed  at  Cape  Breton  merely  to  pre-empt  for 
England  the  gulf  and  valley  of  the  St.  Lawrence, 


I\.ii(/ish  Poller  in  Xoith  Aiiiiricd. 


17 


iland 
rords 
Iseen. 
such 
I  have 
Its  le- 
idfall 
)t  for 
lence, 


which  Cartier  and  Roberval  had  been  of  late  explor- 
ing- in  the  interests  of  the  l-'rench  crown. 

Before  the  discovery  of  this  nia[),  modern  scholars 
had,  almost  without  exception,  placed  Cabot's  land- 
fall on  the  Labrador  coast.  Their  reasons  for  it 
depended  upon  Sebastian's  reported  evidence,  and 
upo.:  some  other  intimations  that  John  Cabot  him- 
self may  have  approved.  I  Icrc,  in  this  more  north- 
ern reo;ion,  somewhere  between  the  straits  of  I^elle 
Isle  and  Cape  Chudlei<;b  at  the  entrance  of  Hud- 
son's Bay,  some  scholars,  in  spite  of  the  niap^  still 
place  the  Cabot  landfall.  The  facts,  however,  that 
the  map  was  well  known  to  Ortelius  and  others, 
profess  jd  geographers,  who  offered  no  objection  to 
the  legends,  and  that  the  Cape  Breton  contact  was 
accepted  by  Michael  Lok,  in  the  mapj  which  he 
made  for  Hakluyt,  go  a  good  way  toward  enforc- 
ing confidence  in  the  testimony  of  the  map.  There 
is  a  third  belief  that  John  Cabot  first  struck  the 
easterly  coast  of  Newfoundland,  and  this  view  is 
naturally  embraced  by  the  writers  upon  that  earli- 
est English  colony.  The  fact  is  that,  without  further 
light,  the  testimony  on  this  point  is  so  conflicting 
that  there  can  never  be  a  general  concurrence  of 
opinion. 

Wherever  the  landfall  may  have  been,  John  Cab- 
ot saw  no  inhabitants  ;  but  he  observed  traces  of 
human  occupation  in  needles  of  bone  and  in  fish- 
nets. Since  the  next  visitor  to  these  waters,  Cor- 
te  eal,  found  silver  disks  and  a  battered  European 


i8 


Cabot  and  the  Transmission  of 


sword  among  the  natives,  it  shows  that  either  Cab- 
ot had  left  such  ar'  '  ::i\\  one  or  the  other  of  his 
voyages,  or  that  the  alK>rigines  had  had  some  ear- 
lier contact  with  the  whites.  Cabot  also  discov- 
ered how  full  the  neighboring  waters  were  of  cod, 
and  established  thus  early  the  reputation  of  this 
great  ocean  fishing-ground. 

Returning  to  England  in  August,  the  recital  of 
his  experiences  prompted  Henry  VII.  to  bestow 
"  upon  hyni  that  founde  the  new  isle,"  a  gratuity 
of  £\o,  and  in  the  following  December  he  gave 
him  a  pension.  Very  soon  afterward,  as  a  mark 
of  the  effect  upon  an  excitable  age,  we  find  this 
vagrant  Venetian  styled  "  the  great  Admiral,"  and 
learn  how  "vast  honor  is  paid  to  him  ;"  how  he 
"wears  silk"  in  the  streets  and  "is  run  after  by  a 
mad  crowd." 

England  thus  enjoyed  the  exultation  that  Spain 
experienced  at  Barcelona  four  years  before,  when 
Ferdinand  and  Isabella  received  the  victorious  Co- 
lumbus. In  both  cases  the  adulation  was  short- 
lived ;  it  merely  sufficed  to  send  out  a  new  expe- 
dition, and  then  both  countries  turned  to  other 
heroes. 


It  was  soon  evident  that  the  Spanish  ambassa- 
dor in  London  felt  that  Cabot  had  invaded  his 
master's  territory,  for  he  made  a  protest  in  behalf 
of  his  sovereign.     It  mattered,  however,  little   to 


English  Poiver  in  North  America. 


»9 


Henry  whether  this  new  western  re^i^ion  was  on 
the  Spanish  or  Portiicruese  side  of  the  papal  hne 
of  demarcation,  for  it  was  not  yet  supposed  that 
that  audacious  meridian,  thoii^di  moved  farther 
west  by  the  agreement  at  Tordesillas,  cut  any  con- 
tinental territory.  The  question  of  respective 
riorhts  remained  really  in  abeyance  till  Cabral,  sail- 
ing under  the  Portuguese  flag,  stumbled  upon  the 
Brazilian  coast  three  years  later. 

That  Henry  VII.  was  in  no  mind  to  be  re- 
strained by  the  bull  of  Alexander,  when  tributary 
lands  were  the  stakes  of  enterprise,  was  quite  as 
apparent  as  that  Henry  VIII.  was  undisturbed  by 
the  papal  renunciation  when  wives  were  the  stakes 
of  other  enterprises.  So  Spain  soon  found  that  re- 
newed efforts  of  the  English,  v.  lich  it  behooved  her 
to  watch,  were  to  be  made  for  western  discovery. 


England's  claim  to  North  America  rests  on  this 
initial  voyage  of  1497,  when  the  standard  of  Henry 
VII.  was  set  up  in  token  of  possession.  We  have 
no  occasion  to  seek  particulars  of  the  succeeding 
voyage  of  the  following  year.  During  this,  John 
Cabot  disappears  from  history,  leaving  not  one 
uttered  word  by  which  we  can  remember  the  pio- 
neer of  English  discovery.  In  this  second  voyage 
a  large  extent  ot  coast  was  apparently  followed, 
stretching  from  the  icy  north  to  the  semi-tropical 
shores  of  Florida.  There  is  no  evidence  that  the 
English  king,  in  giving  his  gratuity  and  pension  to 


20 


Cabot  and  the  Tiausmission  of 


John  Cal)ot,  and  authori/iiiL,^  him  to  make  this  sec- 
ond voyajL^^e,  in  1498,  supposed  the  act  of  posses- 
sion meant  anythinnr  more  than  securinc,s  as  ao^ainst 
other  Europeans,  th(;  rii^ht  to  trade  with  the  deni- 
zens of  Cathay. 

It  is  apparent  from  the  map  of  Ruysch  that  there 
had  been  as  yet  no  suspicion  that  Greenland  was 
otherwise  than  a  part  of  northwestern  Europe, 
neiofhborinQ:  to  Asia,  as  it  had  lont^  been  consid- 
ered.  All  the  north  was  still  a  mystery,  for  the  land 
and  its  inhabitants  bore  little  resemblance  to  what 
the  accounts  of  Marco  l^olo  had  led  thcMii  to  expect. 

The  serious  question  which  lay  in  the  minds 
of  cosmog-raphcrs  was  this  :  How  are  Calicut  and 
the  (iang^es,  which  in  the  past  had  been  reached 
from  Europe  by  g"oimj;-  east,  related  to  this  great 
barrier  which  had  been  encountered  in  approaching 
India  by  going-  west  ? 

The  Portuguese,  schooled  upon  a  forbidding  sea, 
in  their  search  westward  for  islands,  real  to  them 
and  fabled  to  us,  had  later  opened  the  African 
route  to  India. 

Two  and  three  years  after  the  second  Cabot 
voyage,  these  same  Portuguese,  finding  Greenland 
and  now  judging  it  to  be  a  point  of  Asia,  and  unde- 
termined whether  the  land  west  and  southwest  of 
Greenland  was  an  island  or  the  main,  appeared 
under  Cortereal  in  the  very  region  which  Cabot  had 
pre-empted  for  the  English  crown  three  and  four 
years  before, 


lluglish  Poivcr  in  North  America. 


21 


Coiiicidcntly,  Cahral.  hound  with  a  supply  licet 
from  Ijsl)on  for  Iiicha.  was  hornc  vvi'stwanl  to 
the  hrazilian  coast.  Tluis  incetini;  hiiul  unexpect- 
edly, and  sup|)osin^-  himself  not  to  have  exceeded 
the  three  hundred  and  s(,'venty  lea<;ues  west  of  tlie 
Azores,  which  had  been  finally  fixed  upon  for  the 
line  of  demarcation,  he  sent  a  vessel  hack  to  the 
Taq^us  to  report  that  the  coast,  which  he  had 
found,  must  l)e  on  the  Portui^uese  side  of  the  line 
of  demarcation.  This  northeast  shoulder  of  South 
America,  protrudini);-  so  far  seaward,  was  a  devel- 
opment that  the  mind  of  pope  or  kins^-  had  never 
yet  dreamed  of  as  com[)licating  the  Spanish  claim 
to  the  entire  New  World. 

There  was  at  once  an  evident  corollary.  If 
Cabral  had  thus  secured  a  seirment  of  eastern 
South  America  for  the  House  of  Brag-anza,  why 
may  not  Cortereal,  now  on  his  way  north,  ascertain 
if  the  land  there  discovered  for  the  English  may 
not  likewise  stretch  far  enough  east  to  give  the  Por- 
tug-uese  crown  an  equal  claim  to  it,  and  thus  allow 
a  political  rival  to  ilank  on  either  hand  the  Spanish 
possessions  in  the  region  of  the  Antilles  ?  When 
Cortereal  estimated,  or  pretended  to  estimate,  this 
northeastern  coast  of  North  America,  he  found  it, 
as  the  early  Portuguese  drafts  of  the  line  of  demar- 
cation show,  within  the  three  hundred  and  seventy 
leag-ues  west  of  the  Azores,  and,  accordingly,  a  Por- 
tuguese possession  under  the  Pope's  decision.  W^e 
find  in  Cape  Race   to-day  the  Co.po  raso  of  Cor- 


I 


22 


Cabot  and  the  Transmission  of 


tereal,  showing  how  the  Portugruese  left  their  signet 
upon  the  land.  But  this  possession  meant  more 
to  the  Portuguese.  It  meant  for  them  a  base  for 
discovering  a  passage  by  the  northwest  to  their 
settlements  in  India,  and  introduced  into  the  un- 
certain geography  of  the  sixteenth  century  the 
mysterious  straits  of  Anian  as  a  passage  thereto. 

The  Spaniards  and  the  Portuguese  might  dis- 
pute as  they  liked  over  the  position  of  this  line  of 
demarcation.  They  might  disagree,  as  they  did, 
upon  the  length  of  a  league.  They  might  contend, 
as  they  did,  as  to  the  chart  on  which  to  measure 
the  three  hundred  and  seventy  leagues.  The  two 
other  rival  houses  of  England  and  P>ance  cared 
little  how  they  settled  it.  The  Pope,  in  placing 
that  divisional  line  in  the  first  instance  one  hundred 
leagues  west  of  the  Azores  and  Cape  de  Verde  Isl- 
ands, had  not  sought  a  very  precise  position,  for 
the  terms  of  his  bull  (accompanied  of  course  by 
insufficient  knowledge) — had  made  the  line  fall  in 
a  waste  of  water,  so  that  it  could  easily  be  shifted, 
as  occasion  required,  through  ten  degrees  of  lon- 
gitude. In  this  wild  expanse  of  the  darksome  sea 
there  was  little  chance  for  conflict,  but  when  the 
parties  in  interest  pushed  the  line  two  hundred  and 
seventy  leagues  farther  west,  and  the  discoveries 
of  Cabral  and  Cortereal  had  illumined  the  prob- 
lem, then  was  a  conflict  begun,  which,  as  the  Ven- 
ezuelan boundary  dispute  shows,  is  not  settled  to- 
day.     This   line    of  division  has,    in    fact,   swung 


Eui^-lish  Poivcr  in  North  A 


incrica. 


23 


back  and  forth  as  interest  dictated,  and  more  than 
once  the  two  contesting  nations  have  actually 
changed  sides. 


England  looked  on  complacently,  and  she 
scorned  any  interpretation  of  such  a  line.  No  such 
arbitrary  line  coitld  abridge  the  rights  of  discovery, 
so  far  as  the  rivals  of  Spain  and  Portugal  were 
concerned,  and  England  was  bound  by  nothing 
short  of  previous  occupancy  by  a  Christian  people, 
as  was  the  law  of  nations  then  and  is  now. 

Her  Cabot  voyages  had  not,  however,  been  fol- 
lowed up  by  a  settled  possession.  Beyond  the 
temporary  placing  of  drying  stages  on  the  shores 
of  Newfoundland,  Enc^land,  amonir  the  thronuf  of 
hardy  mariners,  who  constituted  a  sort  of  fishing 
republic,  subject  only  to  the  usages  established  on 
the  coast  of  that  island,  exercised  a  kind  of  primacy 
among  them,  which  secured  the  transmission  of  her 
rights. 

England,  also,  by  neglecting  to  press  her  claims 
in  other  ways  along  this  Atlantic  main,  opened  the 
path  for  the  Portuguese  and  the  French  to  invade 
the  neighboring  coasts  for  nearly  a  century  to 
come. 

It  was  not  that  England  did  not  send  out  other 
expeditions,  for  she  did,  like  those  in  which  Portu- 
guese adventurers  joined  her  own  under  the  red 
flag ;  but  for  purposes  of  colonization  they  were  of 
no  effect.     Equally  futile  were  the  expeditions  of 


24 


Cabot  and  the  Transmission  of 


Pert,  in  1516,  those  of  the  Great  Livery  Compan- 
ies  under  Henry  VIII.,    in    15 21,   and  of  Rut,    in 

1527- 

While  th.is  the  territorial  claims  of  England,  ex- 

tendinor  from  Hudson's  Bay  to  Florida,  were  re- 
maining" practically  dormant,  Fagundez,  in  152 1, 
was  placing  the  Portuguese  flag  in  Nova  Scotia; 
Gomez  and  Ayllon,  in  1521-25,  were  tracking  for 
Spain  the  shores  from  the  Bahama  channel  to  the 
Gulf  of  Maine.  In  1524  Sebastian  Cabot,  while 
presiding  at  the  Congress  of  Badayjs,  had  not  de- 
murred at  the  claim  of  the  King  of  Spain  to  ♦^^his 
same  coast.  In  the  same  interval  Verrazano  had 
set  upon  French  maps  the  name  of  New  France 
athwart  the  broad  areas  of  the  continent ;  and  Car- 
tier  and  Roberval,  for  Francis  I.,  had  delved  into 
the  land  by  the  waters  which  proved  to  be  the  out- 
flow of  the  Great  Lakes. 

In  the  year  in  which  Cartier  was  ascending  the 
St.  Lawrence,  when  that  exploit  became  known,  it 
alarmed  the  English,  because  it  jeopardized  their 
claim  to  that  region.  There  was  at  that  time  a  suit 
in  Spain,  in  which  the  Crown  sought  to  abridge 
the  legacy  of  Columbus  to  his  heirs.  In  this  cause 
Sebastian  Cabot,  now  transferred  to  the  service  of 
Spain,  testified  that  he  did  not  know  that  Florida 
was  connected  by  a  continuous  coast  with  the  re- 
gion which  he  claimed  to  have  visited  with  his  fa- 
ther in  1497  and  1498.  This  awkward  contradic- 
tion is  but  a  specimen  of  the  perverse  falsities  that 


English  Power  in  North  America. 


25 


are  found  in  Sebastian  Cabot's  reported  sayings. 
His  negative  testimony  was  not  accepted  and  was 
flatly  denied  by  others,  as  the  contemporary  maps 
disclose. 

It  has  been  suggested  that  the  apathy  of  the 
English  Government  at  this  time  in  not  pushing  the 
other  western  powers  by  like  activity  on  her  part, 
was  owing  in  some  part,  at  least,  to  the  unwilling- 
ness of  Cardinal  Wolsey.  This  prelate  was  too 
ambitious  of  a  seat  on  the  papal  throne  to  risk  suc- 
cess by  thwarting  any  projects  of  the  emperor  for 
supremacy  throughout  the  western  world. 

It  has  also  been  suggested,  as  has  be^^n  already 
remarked,  that  it  was  to  oftset  the  claims  of  France 
from  the  Cartier  voyage  that  Sebastian  Cabot  fal- 
sified the  record  of  his  father's  landfall  by  placing 
it  at  Cape  Breton.  His  purpose  was,  it  is  claimed, 
to  extend  the  English  ri^ht  to  the  water-shed  of 
the  St.  Lawrence  by  marking  in  this  way  the  en- 
trance of  the  Gulf.  By  the  time  (1544)  he  made 
this  pretension  a  part  of  his  great  map,  he  had  cer- 
tainly discovered  that  an  unbroken  coast  extended 
from  Labrador  to  Florida.  If  one  may  '  .,'lieve  that 
this  assignment  of  a  landfall  at  Cape  Breton  was 
indeed  an  act  of  prevarication,  there  is  nothing  as 
yet  to  show  that  the  legend  of  pi'itna  vista  had 
any  official  sanction  in  England. 


The    belief  that    America   was   an    independent 
continent,  which  had  very  early   in   the   sixteenth 


26 


Cabot  and  the  Transmission  of 


century    succeeded    to    the    first  conception  of  its 
identity  with  Asia,  had,  after  the  discovery  of  Bal- 
boa, in    1 5 13,  taken  a  new  form.     This  actual  dis- 
covery of  the  South  Sea  had  given  rise  to  a  belief 
in  the  insularity  of  South  America,  and  had  forced 
that  region  into  the  prominence  which   the  vivid 
descriptions  of  Vespucius,  in  contrast  to  the  flatulent 
incoherencies    of   Columbus,  first  gave    it   as    the 
fourth  quarter  of  the  world.     It  had  thus  become 
the  proper  subject  for  a  new  name  which  had  been 
suggested  in  compliment  to  Americus,  at  St.  Die. 
A  fourth    quarter   of  the    world  naturally  gave   a 
completeness   to  geographical   conceptions.     So  a 
notion  becran  to  rise  that  the  continental  stretch  of 
land  north  of  the  Gulf  of  Mexico  was  but  an  east- 
ward extension  of  Asia,  and  not  a  new  continent. 
The  very  next  year  after  Balboa's   discovery   we 
find,  in  confirmation  of  this,  in  ^  514,  in  a  Portuguese 
portolano,   Mahometan   standards  on   the  Atlantic 
coast,  and    Ayllon    supposed    himself  coasting,  in 
1520,  a    land  of  elephants    and    Chinamen.     The 
most   expressive   delineation   of  this  view  did  not 
come   till   1526,  when  the  monk   Franciscus  made 
that  little  globe  which  became  the  prototype  of  the 
cartographical  conceptions  of  Fineeus.     This  Asi- 
atic conception  did  not  completely  vanish  till  the 
close   of  that  century.     At  the  time  when  Cartier 
was  seeking  up   the  St.  Lawrence  a  passage  to  the 
South  Sea,  in  order  to  prove  at  the  north  the  insu- 
lation of  the  continent  as  Magellan  had  proved  it 


'.f . 


English  Poivcr  in  North  America. 


27 


at  the   south,  a  reaction    was   already  begun,  and 
Mercator,  in   his   earliest  map,  in   1538,  had   made 
both    the    north    and    the    south    continent  one  in 
name  and  configuration.     The  belief  in  the  inde- 
pendence   of    the    northern    continent    now    grew 
steadily.     The  discoveries  of  Cortes  on  the  Pacific, 
and  the  march  of  Coronado  toward  the  mountains 
of  the   modern  Arizona,  both   served   to   convince 
geographers    of  the    substantial    independence    of 
North  America,  with  a  possible  connection  at  the 
north,  which   was   not  disproved  till   earl^;    in  the 
eighteenth    century,   when    Bering  passed  to    the 
Arctic  seas.     When  this  sense  of  the  broadness  of 
the    northern    continent   took    possession    of    the 
European  mind,  Mercator,  who,  in  1 541,  had  given 
it  a  comparatively  slender  waist,  after  the  fashion 
•of  the  earlier  geographers,  was  induced  to  extend 
it  to  something  like  its  true  shape  in  his  great  map 
of    1569.     Better  to  grasp  its  physiographic   feat- 
ures,   Cartier   enabled    that    master    to    place    the 
northern  limit  of  a  coast  range  near  the  St.  Law- 
rence, while  De  Soto's  experiences  found  for  him 
a  southern  limit  in  Georgia.     The  reports  of  Ayl- 
lon,  Gomez,  Verrazano.  and  the  rest,  showed  him 
that    between    Newfoundland    and    the     Gulf    of 
Mexico    there    was    no    river   of  continental    out- 
flow emptying  into  the  Atlantic.      With  these  data 
Mercator    was   the    first    to   divine  our  great  Ap- 
palachian range ;    but  he  made  the  St.   Lawrence 
rise  in  the  mountains  which  Coronado  had  seen, 


^1 


28 


Cabot  and  the  Transmission  of 


so  as  to  constitute  it  the  great  trough  of  the  con- 
tinent. 

Such  were  the  geographical  developments,  which 
showed  that  the  North  American  continent  had 
no,  or  but  slight,  connection  with  Cathay.  This 
disclosure  aroused  England  to  a  conception  of  the 
opportunity  of  gaining  a  new  empire  on  the  Cabot 
claim,  which  she  had  thus  far  practically  neglected. 
Her  purpose  to  revive  this  claim  began  to  assume 
shape  in  the  latter  half  of  the  sixteenth  century ; 
and  under  the  influence  of  Raleigh  it  was  followed 
up  in  the  early  years  of  the  next,  when  England 
formulated  extensive  and  somewhat  preposterous 
claims  in  the  sea-to-sea  charters  of  her  seaboard 
colonies — charters  that  we  did  not  cease  to  hear  of 
till  after  the  close  of  the  American  Revolution, 
when  the  Atlantic  States  made  cession  of  the  west- 
ern countrv. 

It  is  said  that  an  act  in  the  thirty-third  year  of 
Henry  VIII.,  some  five  and  forty  years  after  the 
Cabot  voyage,  is  the  earliest  recognition  of  the 
New  World  in  English  parliamentary  annals.  The 
act  related  in  part  to  the  fisheries  of  Newfoundland, 
and  Raleigh  tells  us  that  these  fisheries  were  **the 
mainstay  and  support  of  the  western  counties  "  of 
England.  It  was  to  the  men  of  those  counties,  nur- 
tured in  seamanship  on  these  American  shores,  that 
England  looked  for  the  destruction  of  the  Spanish 
Armada;  and  after  that  disaster  Spain  withdrew 
her  fishing  fleet  from  the  Newfoundland  waters. 


EnglisJi  Poiver  in  North  America. 


29 


For  nearly  sixty  years  after  the  Cabot  landfall 
no  Englishman  had  vouchsafed  to  the  world  any 
tidings  of  what  Cabot  had  done.  The  earliest 
printed  statement  had  been  made  in  Spain  in  15  16, 
when  Peter  Martyr,  deriving  his  knowledge  doubt- 
less from  Sebastian  Cabot,  had  published  an  ac- 
count. In  Italy,  Ramusio  had  later  profited  by 
Sebastian's  loquacity.  It  was  left  for  Richard 
Eden,  in  1553,  to  be  the  first  to  acquaint  the  Eng- 
lish public  with  any  detailed  account  of  the  New 
World  ;  and  then  not  with  a  narrative  derived  from 
English  explorer  or  fisherman,  but  drawn  from  a 
publication  of  the  German  '  liinster.  Two  years 
later  the  same  English  chronicler  brought  out  a 
version  of  Peter  Martyr,  which,  for  the  first  time, 
fifty-eight  years  after  the  event,  gave  in  English  a 
narrative  of  the  Cabot  discoveries. 

When  Eden  was  thus  making  a  reputation  in 
England  as  a  studious  observer  of  transatlantic  ex- 
ploration, Sebastian  Cabot  was  living  in  London, 
an  old  man.  Eden  doubtless  was  prompted  by  the 
eacfer  counsel  of  this  veteran  to  uroje,  as  he  did, 
the  English  Government  and  people  no  longer  to 
delay  in  taking  possession  of  a  New  World  from 
Baccalaos  to  Florida,  by  virtue  of  the  discoveries 
then  nearly  sixty  years  agone.  We  do  not  err 
then  in  looking  to  Richard  Eden,  a  disciple  of  Se- 
bastian Cabot,  as  the  first  public  instigator  of  the 
policy  of  American  colonization,  which  England  was 
now  ready  to   embrace.     There   were    two    other 


nl 


30 


Cabot  and  the  Transmission  of 


learned  men,  not  loni^  after,  ea^^er  to  join  in  the 
new  propa,«4anda.  Dr.  Dee,  as  early  as  1580,  re- 
corded the  Eng-lish  claim,  and  two  years  later  ( 1 582) 
Hakluyt  first  put  in  evidence,  'in  his  "  Divers 
Voyao^es,"  the  patent  of  1496.  This  little  book, 
the  earliest  which  presented  the  now  famous  name 
of  Hakhiyt  to  the  notice  of  students,  was  accom- 
panied by  a  map  by  Michael  Lok,  which,  as  has 
been  already  remarked,  bore  upon  the  island  of 
Cape  Breton  the  name  of  John  Cabot,  and  the 
date  1497,  correctly  given  for  the  first  time  in  a 
published  form. 

It  was  now  that  Hakluyt  became  the  leading 
champion  of  American  colonization,  which  Raleigh 
already  stood  for,  and  two  years  later  (1584)  he 
drew  up  his  "Treatise  on  Westerne  Planting,"  in 
an  effort  to  arouse  Oueen  Elizabeth  to  the  oc- 
casion.  This  paper,  which  is,  in  fact,  a  recital  of 
what  had  been  done  by  the  rivals  of  England  in 
American  waters,  was  never  printed  till  1877,  when 
the  Maine  Historical  Society  put  scholars  under 
obligations  by  bringing  it  out,  helped  by  the  learned 
scrutiny  of  Leonard  Woods  and  Charles  Deane. 
Hakluyt  had  now  fairly  entered  upon  his  ripened 
and  beneficent  labors,  which  have  ever  since  stood 
scholars  in  such  good  stead.  He  taught  the  Eng- 
lish public  by  his  excerpts,  in  1589,  from  Martyr, 
Ramusio,  Gomara,  and  lesser  chroniclers,  of  the 
gains  in  empire  and  wealth  which  Spain  and 
France   had    acquired   beyond   the    sea — a   record 


English  Power  in  Xorth  America. 


31 


better  systematized  in  the  larirer  work  which  fol- 
lowed at  the  end  of  the  century.  With  this  oreat 
collection  of  Hakluyt,  and  with  the  later  con- 
glomerated record  of  Purchas,  the  history  of  early 
American  exploration  and  settlement  was  fairly  be- 
fore the  English  world.  By  this  time  the  task  of 
Raleigh,  whose  patent  from  Queen  Elizabeth  ex- 
tending only  to  40'  north  did  not  include  the 
Cabot  landfall,  had  fallen  to  the  hands  of  Eerdi- 
nand  Gorges  and  John  vSmith. 

It  had  thus  taken  a  hundred  years  for  the  coloniz- 
ing spirit  of  England  to  spring  to  her  opportu 

'^errazan 


with 


ty 


ere 


Jitabl 


e  vio^or.     Erance,  under   V( 


had  anticipated  her,  nearly  a  lifetime  after  Cabot, 
king  a 
World. 


in 


mak 


claim  for  these  northern  recjions  of  the 


New 


At  the  opening  of  the  seventeenth  century,  when 
the  long  struggle  between  the  two  peoples  was  to 
begin  in  earne ,  with  the  Erench  along  the  St. 
Lawrence  and  the  English  along  the  seaboard, 
they  were  not  unequally  matched  for  the  strife. 
The  Erench  had  a  vigorous  champion  in  Cham- 
plain,  and  their  great  strength  lay  in  the  fact  that 
his  genius  and  will  gave  solidarity  to  his  people 
from  Acadia  to  the  Sault  Ste  Marie.  On  the  other 
side,  the  English  were  without  coherency.  They 
were  wedged  apart  by  the  Dutch  on  the  Hudson, 
and  later  by  the  Swedes  on  the  Delaware.  They 
had  no  conspicuous  leader  whose  power  vvas  every- 


)\ 


33 


Cabot  and  the  Transmission  of 


where  recoo^nized.  They  had  little  community  of 
habit,  were  diversified  by  climate  and  foreii^-n  amal 
o-amations,  and  they  had  a  scant  union  of  commer- 
cial interests.  But  there  was  one  commanding^ 
ai^ency  which  recent  advocates  of  Dutch  influence 
seem  to  have  forgotten.  The  English  common 
law  bound  together  their  social  life,  and  gave  them 
essential  homeogeneousness  of  temperament, 
which  no  alien  infusion  could  overcome.  They 
were  planted  upon  the  soil  and  nourished  upon  the 
sea  in  a  way  that  gave  them  a  country  and  not  a 
sojourning  place,  as  Champlain  was  grieved  to  find 
the  French  were  making  of  the  north.  Farmstead 
and  mill  and  fishing  wear  contrasted  with  the  fur- 
laden  canoe  and  the  mission-hut  of  the  French. 
Families  between  the  Appalachians  and  the  sea 
grew  to  the  soil,  and  acres  were  heirlooms.  On 
the  St.  Lawrence  the  bedizened  savage  was  a 
brother  of  the  trapper ;  the  dusky  daughter  of  the 
Huron  was  the  burden-bearer  of  his  camp.  On 
the  sea  the  New  Englander  established  his  birth- 
right. On  the  water-courses  of  the  north  the  Nor- 
man trader  and  the  Jesuit  thridded  the  wilderness. 
Thus  it  happened  that  while  the  stanch  barkentines 
of  the  English  colonists  were  known  on  the  Spanish 
Main  and  in  the  Mediterranean,  exhibiting  a  race 
of  rugged  seamen,  the  birch-canoe  of  Montreal  was 
poled  against  the  rifts  of  the  Ottawa,  and  broke 
the  reflection  of  the  pictured  rocks  of  Lake  Supe- 
rior till  French  orimace  encountered  not  unsuccess- 


English  Poivcr  in  North  America. 


33 


fully  the  Indian  sign  languag^e  in  the  innermost 
depths  of  the  wilderness.  Whether  in  the  woods 
or  upon  the  ocean,  there  was  no  hazard  too  great 
for  either.  The  French  found  the  portages  which 
conducted  them  to  the  Mississippi.  Two  hundred 
years  after  the  Matthew  lay  to  with  backed  sails 
against  the  verdured  shore  of  the  New  World, 
the  Galilean  priest  and  explorer  were  coursing  the 
great  central  valley  of  the  continent,  and  crossed 
with  a  rival  claim  the  imagined  extension  of  the 
English  charters.  All  the  while  the  Atlantic  col- 
onists were  kept  back  by  the  Appalachians,  and 
knew  nothing  of  what  lay  beyond. 

The  eighteenth  century  opened  and  presented 
the  spectacle  of  the  English  just  beginning  to  real- 
ize, after  a  century  of  colonization,  the  possibilities 
of  the  West.  It  had  taken  five-score  years  for  the 
true  significance  of  the  Cabot  discovery  to  dawn 
upon  the  English  mind.  It  had  required  another 
century  for  that  colonization  to  experience  the 
throes  of  expansion. 

In  the  early  years  of  the  eighteenth  century  the 
traders  of  Carolina  had  pushed  along  the  trails  of 
the  Cherokees  and  Chickasaws.  In  Virginia, 
Spotswood  and  the  famous  knights  of  the  Golden 
Horseshoe  had  glimpsed,  as  was  supposed,  the 
great  inland  waters  which  the  French  possessed. 
The  New  Englanders  were  pushing  aggressively 
hUo  Acadia  to  atone  for  the  fatal  incapacity  of 
Phips  at  Quebec. 


34 


Cabot  and  the  Transmission  of 


As  the  years  of  that  century  went  on,  the  Kn^^. 
Hsh  colonial  ^^^overnors  communicated  to  each  other 
th(!  tidiness  which  reached  them  of  the  l^Vench  on 
the  Ohio  leaguing  the  Indians  in  their  interests, 
and  of  the  trade  growing  up  along  the  Mississippi 
between  Kaskaskia  and  New  Orleans. 

These  messages  made  it  manifest  that  if  the 
westward  extension  of  the  seaboard  charters  was 
to  be  made  good,  and  the  English  continental 
claim  enforced,  there  was  to  be  a  struggle  with  the 
French,  not  only  by  the  St.  Lawrence  Gulf  and 
along  the  lakes,  but  beyond  the  Appalachians  and 
by  the  affluents  of  the  Great  River.  To  New 
Enofland  fell  the  makin^''  of  an  eastward  and  north- 
ward  attack  ;  to  the  middle  and  southern  colonies 
the  passage  of  the  mountain-passes  and  the  task 
beyond. 

By  the  middle  of  the  century  the  rivals  were  pre- 
pared for  the  contest.  An  alliance  with  the  sav- 
ages, mainly  on  the  French  side,  gave  a  hideous 
aspect  to  a  deadly  struggle,  which  spread  from  the 
Bay  of  Fundy  to  the  Altamana.  One  fateful  day, 
when  a  Virginia  colonel,  preparing  for  greater 
deeds,  fell  upon  the  unsuspecting  camp  of  Jumon- 
ville,  there  was  begun  a  drama,  whose  curtain  was 
to  fall  upon  a  large,  if  not  complete,  fulfilment  of 
England's  destiny  in  America. 

In  the  century  and  a  half  which  had  passed  since 
the  movements  in  the  seaboard  plantations  had 
harbingered    the    ultimate    outcome  of  the   Cabot 


English  Poiver  in  Xort/i  Ann-ricn.  35 

claim,  there  had  been  a  constant  increase  in  the 
numerical  disparity  of  the  two  peopK;  now  arrayed 
against  each  other.  Thrift,  stabiHty,  and  a  fixed- 
ness upon  the  soil,  as  well  as  the  inxitin;^'-  concH- 
tions  of  a  new  country  wiiich'drew  alien  blood  to 
be  assimilated,  had  raised  the  census  of  the  Vavj;- 
lish  colonies  to  a  heii^ht  which  represented  a  niih- 
tary  prowess  that  miq^ht  well  have  discourai^ed  an 
enemy  less  virile  than  that  along-  the  St.  Lawrence. 
Had  the  French  not  valued  as  a  compensation  the 
agile  woodcraft  of  their  bushrangers,  and  the 
trusty,  if  murderous,  spirit  of  their  red  allies,  they 
might  still  have  taken  courage  from  the  incoher- 
ency  of  the  English  colonies,  their  jealousies,  and 
the  self-centred  policies  of  their  little  autonomies, 
as  well  as  from  the  apathy  of  some  of  their  not 
wholly  assimilated  aliens.  It  was  these  elements 
which  protracted  the  war  for  seven  years,  till  a 
lucky,  though  sturdy,  stroke  on  the  plains  of  Abra- 
ham, hardly  more  assured  of  success  than  an  ear- 
lier fortunate  hap  at  Louisbourg,  led  to  the  pacifi- 
cation of  1763. 


In  the  two  hundred  and  sixty-six  years  which 
had  passed  since  England  established  her  claim  by 
the  prhna  vista  of  the  maps,  there  had  been  first 
a  long  period  of  apathy,  then  a  brisk  century  of 
colonization,  then  an  active  jealousy  of  alien  en- 
croachments. This  distrust  of  the  French  led,  as 
we  have  seen,  to  a  war,  whose   outcome  had  not 


36 


Cabot  and  the  Transmission  of 


only  made  good  the  seaboard  charters  in  their 
extension  to  the  Mississippi,  but  had  rescued  the 
valley  of  the  St.  Lawrence  and  the  Great  Lakes 
from  French  control,  and  had  brought  into  one 
dominion  the  vast  areas  of  the  eastern  half  of  the 
continent  from  Hudson  Bay  on  the  north  to  Span- 
ish Florida  on  the  south. 

With  the  meteor-flag  had  spread  the  masterful 
speech  of  England.  Thus  it  was  that  a  Hudson 
Bay  factor,  at  the  trading  stations  on  Nelson  River, 
received  his  orders  in  the  commercial  phrase  of 
F'enchurch  Street  in  London.  Thus  it  was  that 
the  Knickerbockers  of  New  York,  the  Scotch-Irish 
of  Pennsylvania  and  of  the  valley  of  Virginia,  who 
were  also  pushing  upon  the  Holston  and  the  Cum- 
berland ;  the  Swiss  and  Huguenot  of  the  Carolinas, 
and  the  Salzburger  of  Georgia  were  being  indoc- 
trinated with  English  law,  couched  in  the  lan- 
guage of  Shakespeare  and  Bunyan.  Over  them 
all  streamed  the  same  flag,  which  had  fluttered  in 
the  shore  breezes  upon  the  little  Matthew  in  1497, 
and  had  flaunted  in  defiance  when  Drake  and 
other  west  countrymen  hung  upon  the  flanks  of 
the  Spanish  Armada. 


From  the  Treaty  of  Paris,  in  1763,  to  that  which 
recognized  the  independence  of  the  American  Re- 
public, twenty  years  later,  social  and  political  con- 
ditions worked  great  revolutions  along  the  western 
march. 


Etielish  Poiver  in  North  America. 


37 


A  change  of  allegiance  drove  some  of  the  best 
blood  of  the  seaboard  across  the  great  water-way 
which  Cartier  and  Champlain  opened,  and  along 
which  the  trade  of  Duluth  and  Fort  William  is  now 
seeking  a  deep  channel  to  the  Atlantic.  The  rigors 
of  the  war  for  independence  reared  twin  and  manly 
races,  that  at  its  close  and  since  have  carried  the 
same  blood  westward  by  parallel  ways  on  each 
side  of  the  boundary  of  the  United  States  and 
Canada.  Time  must  show  if  these  divided  cur- 
rents are  bound  again  to  form  one  and  the  same 
political  brotherhood,  under  a  common  flag. 


The  present  century  came  in  and  the  name  and 
fame  of  Cabot  had  almost  passed  from  the  memory 
of  American  and  Canadian,  who  owe  him  so  much, 
when  the  ascendancy  of  that  passion  for  territorial 
development,  which  has  always  been  a  strain  in 
the  English  blood,  wherever  it  flowed,  spread  its 
domination  to  the  Gulf  of  Mexico  in  treaty-con- 
quests from  Spain,  and  stretched  its  sway  to  the 
Rockies,  in  the  acquisition  of  Louisiana  from  the 
French.  Later  stiii,  the  war  with  Mexico  opened 
to  Anglo-American  influences  a  long  stretch  of  the 
Pacific  coast. 

With  the  transfer  of  Alaska  from  Russia  the  in- 
fluence of  the  same  policy  has  been  extended  along 
the  sea  which  Balboa  first  sighted,  from  Bering's 
Strait  to  Santa  Barbara,  until  at  last  there  is 
not  a  State  north  of  Mexico  which  now  prints   its 


38 


E)isrlish  Powej-  in  North  America. 


sessional  laws  in  any  other  language  than  English  ; 
and  not  a  political  community  that  cannot  join  in 
remembering  the  event  which  next  year  we  com- 
memorate. 

On  the  completion  of  four  hundred  years  from 
that  summer's  dawn,  when  the  sun  dispelled  the 
damp  and  lay  the  warmth  of  its  beams  all  the  way 
from  icy  Labrador  to  coralled  Florida,  with  not  a 
Christian  soul  to  greet  it,  we  may  well  pause  to 
scan  the  portentous  annals  which  have  followed. 

Since  the  Matthew  hove  to,  and  John  Cabot 
threw  the  lead  and  first  felt  the  rebound  from 
American  land  as  it  trembled  along  the  slackening 
line,  a  like  thrill  has  been  repeated  in  every  new 
sounding  of  the  depths  of  English  power  through- 
out this  broad  continent,  from  that  day  to  this, 
throuirh  four  centuries  of  renown  ! 


In 


hi 


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